Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Sunday, October 04, 2015

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy

Testing
the boundaries of marital bliss

by Julie Carter

The term
“marital bliss” used during any moment of working cattle at the ranch is said
only with the greatest sarcasm. It denotes an impressive amount of verbal
restraint indicating the likelihood of an explosive flood of expletives
building behind a failing dam of good sense.

Husband
and wife ranchers represent the best and the worst of wedded teamwork in
sustaining their livelihood in remote locations that come with their own kind
of difficulties. If they weren’t speaking to each other before the work
happens, they wisely will refrain from it during and after, if only to save on
the accident insurance.

A cowboy
husband usually has high expectations of his only help, the little missus, when
it comes to bailing him out of a bind that he won’t admit he probably shouldn’t
have gotten into in the first place. Those expectations don’t lessen with the
increase of age –his or his bride’s.

Cell
phones have made it ever so much easier for him to get some help when he’s
roped himself into a place of needing a second set of hands. The sound of that
“ring ring” brings with it both dread and aggravation because it means drop
whatever you are doing and come running.

“Bring a
rope, a tie down string, pliers and the pickup. I’ve got a heifer down. Now!”

This is
coming from a cowboy with a bit of gray around the ears and a few skeletal
parts that have been surgically replaced, so the days of roping, tripping and
doctoring alone are a thing of the painful past. Add to that a green and very
fresh young horse, and yes, probably wasn’t the best recipe at this time for
the project, but it happened.

The wife
in her mucking-out-the-house wardrobe of cut off pants and a t-shirt takes a
minute to throw on socks and shoes, races around to gather up the ordered items
and drives off across the pasture not knowing quite sure where he is exactly.
Sure enough, “ring ring.” “I’m over here, your drove right past me,” he says
with not-so-veiled aggravation.

She gets
turned around on a rough two-track road, drives back across the pasture and
finds him with a yearling heifer he has tripped, lying at the end of the rope
dallied to the saddle horn. The wife takes the tie
string, ties up the two hind feet, puts another rope on the front feet and
hands him the rope. He switches ropes, stretches the heifer out and the wife
gets the pliers and begins pulling porcupine quills from the less-than-happy
heifer’s nose.

The cowboy
bride has thoughts of “I’m getting too old for this kind of stuff” as the
heifer thrashes and fights her restraints. She gets the job done with a
measurable amount of huffing and puffing and for reasons known only to him, the
cowboy is a tad testy when it’s all over. She doesn’t ask why, or really care
at this point. She gets the ropes off the bovine who jumps up and takes off at
a run.

Insuring
the beloved feeling of the moment now that the crisis was over, he says to her,
not “thanks” or “appreciate the help” but a surefire gunpowder moment of“Sure wish I had a camera to get a picture of
you in your Walmart shopping clothes.”

And, as
they say, that’s when the fight started.

Julie can be reached for comment, if you dare,
at jcarternm@gmail.com.